2012 Olympics: complexities and costs of "legacy"

Yesterday's Economic Development Committee meeting was full of regeneration jargon about "creating media ecosystems" and "embedding anchor tenants within broader strategies" (or thereabouts), but if you can find a spare hour to spend with the webcast you will gain a clearer picture of how vast is the task of making the Olympic "legacy" work - and how unclear the post-Games future of the Olympic Park remains.

Four experts in the business of making lumps of brand new sport and media infrastructure work for the benefit of the communities around them offered their thoughts on "dos" and "don'ts". Where the main stadium is concerned, the consensus was that a permanent football tenant - West Ham, of course, is very interested - is the best way to ensure that the surrounding neighbourhood feels permanently alive, though how this would be squared with the Olympic bid commitment to provide a world class athletics venue remains an unanswered question.

One guest in particular, Danny Meaney of New Media Partners, was at pains to stress the complexities of planting and nurturing a media hub on a brand new site far from those that already exist in London. "Media industries struggle with new buildings," he said and made the point that while a suitable new anchor tenant would "draw more people in" the very newness of the building would tend to drive up the surrounding land prices, making it harder for others to follow.

He pointed out that Hollywood, the biggest media hub of all, had been built with public money - huge subsidies and tax breaks - to draw the US film industry west from New York. The Lib Dems' Dee Doocey had already observed that at present there is no public money budget for post-Games regeneration, other than to remove superfluous bridges. What price "legacy" in the "age of austerity"?

To get up to speed with other recent developments, check out Paul Norman's Olympic blog. Westfield, whose shopping centre will be another huge feature of the Park, is seeking to host a casino there. Meanwhile, private sector investment has been "leveraged" into Bromley-by-Bow in the form of a Tesco-led regeneration scheme that will comprise not just a supermarket, but a 100-bed hotel, 450 new homes, a library and a primary school. As the Con-Lib axe hovers, is this the future of "legacy"?